The key facts
- Voting takes place on November 3, with polling stations open from 7:00 to 20:00 local time
- Trump called the elections 'the most important midterms in our lifetime'
- The White House is contesting procedures in Alaska and California, citing possible fraud
Elections as a referendum on Trump
On November 3, 2026, American voters will determine the composition of next year's Congress and a number of key state-level offices. Most polling stations are open from 7:00 to 20:00 local time; early voting in some states began as far back as mid-September, but on Tuesday all polling stations are open. According to The National, the elections are taking place against the backdrop of a rising cost of living in the US due to the war with Iran: prices for gasoline, groceries and other essential goods remain high. Although President Donald Trump himself is not on the ballot, he has urged voters to vote as if the election were about him. On Monday, in a speech at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool , he called the vote 'the most important midterm elections, I think, in our lifetime' and declared that the country had entered a 'Golden Age of America'.
What the results show
Traditionally, the sitting president's party loses seats in midterm elections; the scale of the Republicans' losses will show how satisfied voters are with Trump's performance in the first two years of his return to office. The outlet cites the economic situation as a separate factor in the campaign: rising gasoline and grocery prices against the backdrop of the war with Iran directly affect voter sentiment, and the elections themselves effectively turn into an assessment of the administration's policies.
Disputes over voting procedures
Preparations for the elections were accompanied by an administration campaign against what it describes as fraud in the elections. In Alaska, the Department of Justice tried through the courts to bar election officials from declaring a winner in the Senate race unless it was the incumbent Republican Dan S. Sullivan: the administration argued that voters could be confused by a candidate with an almost identical name — Dan J. Sullivan. The outlet notes that this issue was widely covered, the incumbent senator's name is clearly marked on the ballot, yet the White House claimed an attempt at fraud. In California, the White House sought to reject up to 20,000 mail-in ballots on the grounds that they had been cast by non-US citizens. The National recalls that Trump has disputed election results before: after the 2020 presidential election, he claimed there was widespread fraud in favor of Joe Biden, although election officials and members of his own administration said at the time that there had been no large-scale fraud.
